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Does looking at the 2025-26 Premier League table get you down? If so, try one of our six alternative tables.
When needing a snapshot look, a league table is a pretty helpful barometer of each team’s fortunes – if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be what decided every team’s fate at the end of the season.
However, a league table doesn’t tell us the whole story.
Sure, when a campaign concludes we may boil everything down to points won (and any other potential tie breakers), but does it reflect everything?
While we aren’t here to try to convince you of some revolutionary way to rank teams at the end of a season, we do want to take some slightly different approaches to the way we consider the standard Premier League table.
Arsenal are top in reality (just about), but they might not be in all of our alternative Premier League tables…
Expected Points Table
So, you’re familiar with the actual table. What about the expected table?
Our expected points table is created using a model that simulates the number of goals scored by each side in every match based on the expected goals (xG) value of all shots taken. It then uses the simulated number of goals to determine the match outcome (win/draw/loss), with each fixture simulated 10,000 times. The expected points for each team in every match can then be calculated based on the proportion of sims they won/drew/lost.
This is, of course, not an exact science, as xG data doesn’t consider numerous factors such as game state and dangerous periods of possession that don’t lead to shots. Nevertheless, expected points can give us a truer idea of how teams are actually performing and whether their position in the table really reflects their output.
And as you’ll see from the table below, there are a few outliers this season. Aston Villa are among the most significant of them.
Unai Emery’s men are third in the real table, but throughout this season they’ve been much lower in the expected points table. Currently, they are nine places higher than they ought to be, according to the xG data.
There are a few potential explanations.
Firstly, they have overperformed in relation to their non-penalty xG by +5.0, a figure bettered by only three teams, meaning they’ve either benefited from extremely good finishing, poor goalkeeping, or both. Given they’ve scored more goals from outside the box than anyone else this season (13), this isn’t especially surprising.
But also, Emiliano Martínez ranks third among all goalkeepers for goals prevented (4.6). These two facts alone mean their goal difference is 9.6 higher than it should be, and that can make a massive difference.
Elsewhere, the expected points table suggests Sunderland are fortunate to be as high as 11th, with the underlying data suggesting they should be eight places lower and rooted in the relegation zone.
On the other hand, Wolves are a whopping 18 points – and three places – worse off in reality than they are in the expected points table, which has them making a far greater fist of avoiding relegation.
Also, Crystal Palace are six places lower than they ought to be, according to the data. Much of the blame is apportioned to their finishing, as their 23 non-penalty goals is 14 lower than their non-pen xG (37.0); their underperformance in relation to their non-pen xG is more than twice as significant as any other side (Nottingham Forest – 6.0).
First Half vs Second Half
Football most certainly is a game of two halves. That is literally the case, as well as figuratively, as we’ll show.
It may not come as a much of a shock to learn the table changes quite drastically when looking specifically at first-half or second-half results in isolation.
Some teams will be fitter or mentally stronger than others, and this may contribute to them being better in second halves of games than some of their rivals. Similarly, others might have a mindset that means they’re particularly fired up in the first half and this can contribute to them running out of steam later.
A good place to start here is with Manchester City.
You might remember that, across their first six league games of 2026, they didn’t score a single goal in the second half of matches – they did score six first-half goals, however.
That is very much in keeping with their first-half superiority over the whole season. If we only considered results at half-time, City would be nine points clear of Arsenal at the summit – but if we looked at second-halves in isolation, they’d drop to sixth, 13 points behind the Gunners.
But that’s not the starkest difference.
Manchester United go from fourth in the first-half table to 13th in the second-half table; Aston Villa are 13th in the first, second in the second; West Ham slide all the way from 10th in the half-time table to 20th in the second-half standings (albeit with a game in hand on Wolves).
It would seem there is a slight correlation between teams who do well in the second half and those that are younger; the top 10 of the second-half table (26 years, 91d) are, on average, 224 days younger (starting XIs only) than those in the bottom 10 (26y, 315d). This might not be enough to jump to conclusions, though.
There is also game state to consider. If a team are winning at half-time by at least two clear goals, they don’t need to ‘win’ the second half as well. For example, Man City led Fulham 3-0 at the break last week, which ended up as the final score, so they technically only drew the second half. But with the three points already in the bag, and as long as it didn’t become as chaotic as in the reverse fixture, the hosts did not need to bust a gut to score again.
Say Goodbye to Stoppage Time
Premier League football is quite a bit different now to even just a few years ago, with refereeing directives seeing more and more stoppage time added at the end of matches.
It’s no longer unusual to see seven, eight, even nine or 10 minutes shown on the fourth official’s board around the 90th minute.
But what if the game ended right on the 90-minute mark no matter what?
“Late goals” wouldn’t cease to exist of course, because the framing of them would just change slightly – but stoppage-time goals wouldn’t be a thing, and that would certainly impact certain clubs.
Leeds United, for instance, would be five places better off in 10th if we removed all goals scored after the 90th minute. That’s because they’ve conceded nine such goals in the Premier League this season, more than anyone else.
Everton and Fulham, however, would each drop three places if their stoppage-time goals were suddenly taken away from them.
Liverpool have had a problem with late concessions this term, but they’ve also scored a few, so they would only actually be two points better off if stoppage-time goals were removed. Still, that’d be enough to put them fourth, trading places with Man Utd.
Out With Set-Pieces
Set-pieces are so trendy at the moment, but what if they weren’t? What if set-pieces were so despised and undervalued that teams just didn’t bother with them?
Admittedly, we are requiring you to really stretch your imagination here, but that’s the point of our alternative tables.
So, in this alternate universe, goals from set-pieces and penalties aren’t a thing, and it probably won’t take you long to work out who’d lose out the most in such a dimension.
Arsenal’s points total would decrease by eight without goals from set-pieces and penalties. After all, 21 of their 52 goals in the Premier League this term have come from set plays and spot-kicks.
Aston Villa would also be big losers here, seeing their points total reduce by seven, while Everton and Sunderland would each miss out on six.
The biggest gainers would be Burnley as they’ve only scored nine set-piece/penalty goals but have conceded 19. Other gainers would be Brighton and Bournemouth, the latter of whom have let in more set-piece/penalty goals than any other Premier League team this term (20).
(Re)Moving the Goalposts
Towards the end of the 2023-24 season, we asked a curious question: What if every shot that hit the post or crossbar actually went in?
It’s a light-hearted hypothetical, so don’t take it too seriously, but we decided we’d run the numbers again for this season to see what the impact would be.
The point is to show how fine the margins are. After all, the width of a goalpost or crossbar is 12 centimetres, though the curvature of the goal frame means it’s slightly less in reality – as such, a team can feasibly miss out on a title, European place or safety by a matter of centimetres.
Of course, teams also benefit from having their own post/crossbar struck, it’s not just a one-way street. But it doesn’t happen in equal measure.
It stands to reason that the better teams might benefit more in our hypothetical woodwork table. Better teams generally have more shots and face fewer than the worst sides, so they’re more likely to hit the post/crossbar than their opponents.
But as you can see, Arsenal would be among the biggest losers in a world without goalposts.
Fulham would lose the most points (5), followed by Aston Villa (4), but then it’s Arsenal (3). That would see them drop down to third in the table because we also have to take into consideration the outputs of other teams. Manchester City would gain four points to go top, and Manchester United earn an extra 10 points to shoot up to second, ahead of the Gunners on goal difference.
United have hit the woodwork 18 times in the Premier League this term, four more than any other team. Also, only Brentford (3) and Chelsea (6) have seen their own post/bar hit less often than United (7).
What does it all mean, then? Well, we put it somewhere between everything and nothing. The criteria for winning the Premier League isn’t about to change from points to expected points, nor are we about to start leading a campaign for goalposts to be reduced in width.
The real table will continue to reign supreme, though these alternative tables at least serve to remind us of the sport’s rollercoaster nature and that there’s often more to it than meets the eye.
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